this post was submitted on 18 May 2024

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Four US daycare workers charged with spiking children’s food with melatonin (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/news

93 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Four New Hampshire daycare employees allegedly spiked children’s food with the sleep supplement melatonin and were arrested on Thursday.

After a six-month investigation, police discovered that children had been furtively dosed with melatonin. Officers arrested the daycare owner, 52-year-old Sally Dreckmann, along with three of her employees: Traci Innie, 51; Kaitlin Filardo and Jessica Foster, who are both 23.

Melatonin is a sleep aid supplement that is sold over the counter. But the long-term impacts of melatonin on children are not widely known.

Furthermore, there have been several reports of children being overdosed with melatonin in recent years. About 7% of emergency department visits between 2012 and 2021 were for children who had accidentally ingested melatonin, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine issued a health warning for melatonin use around kids and adolescents, warning against the lack of US Food and Drug Administration oversight for the sleep aid.

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[–] Stamau123 12 points 4 months ago (3 children)

7% of all children hospital visits were for melatonin ingestion? That's surprisingly high. But I guess real childrearing problems have been mostly done away with so you get weird visits like that when you do.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago

It's worth considering that a lot of melatonin is sold as gummies. They're tasty. Little kids finds candy (gummies) and eats a whole bottle. Uh oh.

I'm sure there is a non-dangerous, or at least not life threatening, dose for most kids. I'd be surprised if one gummy sent a 10yo or similar aged kid to an ER without other extenuating circumstances.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

The article said 7% of all emergency visits (with no qualifier). You said 7% of visits by children which sounds more reasonable. The actual statistic is even more specific than that.

During 2019–2022, melatonin was implicated in 7% of all ED visits for unsupervised medication exposures by infants and young children.

- https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/pdfs/mm7309a5-H.pdf

The article links a summary of the wrong CDC report (June 2022) that does not contain this stat. The report that this stat comes from (quoted above) was published in March 2024 by a completely different group of researchers.

And why did the article say the statistic was for 2012-2021 when the quote statistic refers to the period 2019-2022? Because they've conflated another statistic from the same report:

The prevalence of melatonin use by U.S. adults quintupled from 0.4% during 1999–2000 to 2.1% during 2017–2018 (1). This rise coincided with a 530% increase in poison center calls for pediatric melatonin exposures during 2012–2021 and a 420% increase in emergency department (ED) visits for unsupervised melatonin ingestion by infants and young children during 2009–2020 (2,3).

It took me about 10 seconds to find the report and verify the stat. It was the first link returned in the search results.

Journalism really is dead.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I found it surprising as well. Maybe parents of young children tend to take melatonin to help them sleep, because parents tend to be sleep deprived?